Bangkok Glutton

(Photo by Andrew Hiransomboon)

A few years ago, I got a Facebook message out of the blue from an acquaintance that I didn’t know very well. I don’t get angry that often (or didn’t at the time, pre-menopause) but his message really annoyed me. I mean, not only have you reached out to me for no reason (no food involved, just aimless conversation), but you do it to say such stupid stuff.

Him: Let’s talk Thai food.

Me: OK.

Him: Those Thai soups that have all that gunk in them. Why do Thai chefs not take it out before they serve it? My personal theory is that they are lazy.

Me: I don’t agree with those Western rules for plating Asian dishes.

Him: OK, thanks for playing!

Me: Bye

I mean, seriously? Don’t bother me with your “poor-benighted-savages-who-need-a-finger-wagging-foreigner-to-tell-them-what-to-do” bullshit and then have the temerity to expect me to agree with you? Does this man not read anything I write? (of course not) Do I complain when I get a big-ass steak that the chef hasn’t cut for me into bite-sized pieces? No. Do I think the chef is maybe a little bit lazy? Possibly. I mean, why do I have to do all that labor, at the table, myself? An Asian food chef would know to pre-slice that steak. What am I paying this jackass for?

Maybe I’m still a bit annoyed at that exchange. In any case, I never talked to this man again. But I do continue to enjoy “soups with the gunk still in them” like tom yum, tom som, tom saap, basically all the toms. I enjoy them like many other Thai people do, because they know to just ignore the stuff that they don’t want to eat, while still enjoying the smells from the aromatics. We do this because we have eyes. I understand that this is a privilege.

But here’s a soup for people who get confused about what you should eat and what you should leave in the bowl. It’s called jaw pakkad, and it’s a Northern Thai staple, available at any restaurant that calls itself a “huen” anywhere in the region. It’s a soup (“jaw”) made with Chinese flowering cabbage (“pakkad”) and tua nao (fermented bean discs). Because this ingredient (I’m talking the bean discs) is so hard to find outside of Northern Thailand, I despaired of ever trying this dish out for myself. But I found some beautiful “pakkad” (also known as pak Guangdong in Thai) in Klong Toei market and couldn’t help but try.

So I subbed out the bean discs for thao jiew, or Chinese-style fermented brown bean sauce, and went to work. The result was something that I personally love: super-umami with shrimp paste and brown beans but also salty and sour from tamarind. If you like these types of flavors, I feel like you’ll love this soup. Added bonus: no gunk.

Now, if only we could find a good replacement for Chinese flowering cabbage …

Jaw Pakkad

Serves 4

Prep time: 10 minutes                            Cooking time: 2 hours

• 300 g pork ribs, cut into individual riblets
• Enough water to cover pork in a pot (around 3-4 cups)
• 1 small bunch of flowering Chinese cabbage (pakkad in Northern Thai or pak Guangdong in Thai), thick stems and yellow leaves removed but blossoms kept
• 2 Tablespoons thao jiew (Chinese-style fermented brown bean sauce)
• 1 Tablespoon fish sauce
• 6 Tablespoons tamarind juice (for cooking, not drinking)
• 3-4 dried chilies (for garnish)

For curry paste*:

• ½ teaspoon salt
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• 5 small Thai shallots (or 2 Western shallots), peeled and chopped
• 1 Tablespoon shrimp paste

First, set the pork ribs to cook in water over medium-high heat, about 1-1 ½ hours. Keep skimming impurities from the surface (foamy bits and impurities) all the while, not obsessively but fairly frequently. If the water starts to fall below the level of the ribs, add water to cover and bring back to the boil. Your ribs are done cooking (and your broth is done brothing) when the ribs can be easily pierced by a fork.

While ribs are cooking, pound your paste base, starting with the salt and garlic and adding each ingredient as you go. Once your ribs are soft, add the paste and stir to disperse. Allow to flavor the broth for a few minutes, then add your brown bean sauce (thao jiew). Stir to disperse again, and add fish sauce and tamarind juice. Taste and adjust seasoning if needed. Once you’re satisfied, add your vegetables and allow to cook, about 5-10 minutes. Remove from the heat and serve as part of a great Northern Thai meal.

* Pro tip: If you have nam prik tha dang (red eye chili dip, page x) already made, you can add that paste to the soup instead of making your own.

A lot is made out of the Lanna culture when you’re in Chiang Mai, and how old and distinct it is from Central Thailand. While that is all good and true, it is also oversimplifying what a real patchwork quilt of cultures the “Rose of the North” really is, and how truly awesome that makes the former Lanna capital. So when you stumble upon a place like Chin Haw Market — open only on Friday mornings — you want to cherish it, and go there again and again.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Chin Haw market only offers items made by the Chin Haw people: a Muslim-Chinese group whose extensive travels resulted in bringing influences all the way from Persia via to Silk Road to Northern Thailand, resulting in dishes like khao soy. But it’s a mash-mash of all of the “minority” groups in the area, like the Muslim-Thais selling “cha chak” (“shaken tea”, poured from a great height with much ceremony) to beef satay to samosas, available at the entrance to the market.

A little ways into the market, a vendor offering various vats of curry with rice is attracting a long queue, which of course piques our interest. We head over to have a look and are rewarded with possibly the most beautiful biryani we’ve ever seen, peppered liberally with colorful spices that glow like jewels in the sun.

Further on down the way, lined with vendors selling all manner of typical market food like fried tofu and chicken rice, a vendor at the end of the aisle threatens to dominate the whole space. It’s the halal Hamza Goat Farm stall, and its main product is prominently displayed next to the vendor’s head:

But just across from this meaty display, a hill tribe couple roasts local peanuts, marked with the “tiger stripe” pattern that makes them unique.

Just a few steps away, a pair of Chinese men offer their house-cured Yunnanese ham, traditional cured sausages, and sausages liberally seasoned with the flavor of the moment in Thailand, Sichuan-style “mala”.

And next to them, a Yunnanese couple serve up fresh pancakes made from just-shucked corn. We take a bite when they are plucked off the griddle, and they are everything they look like they’d be: warm, sweet, soft and comforting.

We want to taste more, but we’re heading into a section that is not quite Yunnanese, and not quite … well, we don’t know. We ask a vendor in Thai what a tangled root-looking vegetable is called, and he responds, “I don’t know its name in Thai.”

Further on, a vendor is making a dish that we’ve never seen before in Thailand, layering a thin crepe with scrambled egg and scallions on one side, then flipping it over to receive two big lashings of sauce and folding it over crispy rectangles of dough — something similar to what we’ve seen in Taiwan. What is it exactly and where does it come from? Hell if we know.

But now we’re heading to more well-known ground. A scrum of customers surrounds one particular vendor, serving the fish noodle dish known as mohinga (aka “Myanmar’s national dish”) as quickly as she can plate it. We try to order, but she gestures at a table, already waiting for their noodles, and then the line that is waiting to sit at that table next. “We’ll come back later,” we say, thinking later = sometime next year.

Finally, after a bit of maneuvering, more crowds and the sight of stressed faces lead us to a covered tent, where handmade dim sum is being doled out to an anxious crowd of customers. Next to him is the Shan table, serving “khao ganjin” (rice cooked in pork blood and wrapped in banana leaves), their take on “khao soi” — sans coconut milk and with more of a nam ngiew-like ragu — and a dish we’ve never seen before: a tofu porridge made of green peas and a thickening agent, left overnight in plastic bags, drizzled in broth and seasoned with deep-fried garlic oil and fresh chervil leaves.

We want to eat more, but we are full to bursting when we finally make our way out of the market, clutching our purchases to our aching bellies, the sound of Chinese songs blaring in our ears. In a world that seems like it wants to pare itself down to homogeneity and conformity, it’s comforting to have places like the Chin Haw market still around, ready to add more flavor and genuine surprise to our lives.

The name of this post is a really rough translation of the name for Chef Prin Polsuk and Mint Jarukittikun’s restaurant, Samrub Samrub Thai. Come to think of it, I really should have started this post with a photo of their food.

It’s fancy food, as you can see, served in courses, which is not particularly Thai. But the main part of the meal, with rice, is served “family-style”, which in this case, is “Thai-style”, all the elements working together to form a harmonious whole that is meant to create the one perfect bite on your spoon. David Thompson’s Aksorn also serves its food this way, with courses and then a Thai “samrub”. Both restaurants have a Michelin star, if you pay attention to that sort of thing. But both also try to maintain some sort of connection with how Thai food is traditionally (some would say “used to be”) served.

Because the idea of a Thai “samrub” — a collection of dishes that are meant to work together — is disappearing from Thai food. Typically it’s all meant to harmonize on the spoon with your rice (you can’t miss rice); if you have rice, you have to have a soup, or at least a curry, or everything will be too “dry”; you need something to combat the possible fattiness of a coconut milk-rich curry, like a spicy salad yum or a chili dip (nam prik); but if you don’t have a coconut milk-rich curry you can indulge in a coconut milk-based dip like lon; then there’s the extra fiber of a stir-fried veg; and then something even more extra so that the pigs at the table (me) don’t feel hungry later, like a non-spicy meat dish if your curry is spicy or a comfortingly bland soup … you get the picture. This sense for putting together a “samrub” used to be intuitive to Thais, ingrained after decades of eating the same way. For me, raised in my teens on Domino’s and McDonald’s, it’s taken years to figure it out properly.

Presented together, the bounty of the meal is supposed to be as pleasing to the eye and as warming to the heart as any beautifully presented terrine of foie gras festooned in beluga caviar could ever hope to be. If this sounds outrageous to you, think of a dim sum meal: you wouldn’t want those dumplings and noodles to be served course-style, would you? Of course not! You would want them collected all together on the lazy Susan, silently cursing your dining companions for hogging all the abalone.

Unfortunately, this is not a normal way to eat anymore. People don’t have time to sit together as a family to enjoy five or six dishes with rice. Today, it’s all about aharn jan diew (one-plate meals), and if you’re not eating khao man gai (chicken rice) and, say, pad kaprao (holy basil stir-fry), you often don’t even get a soup with it, and you probably end up throwing away the cucumbers too because what the hell are those for?

All of which is to say, all those old Thai eating rules — always soup with rice, always bland with spicy, always crunchy with smooth, always fresh with cooked — are slipping away. Eating that way, with so many dishes, is a privilege, even luxurious, the Thai equivalent of one of those enormous steaks you get covered in gold foil with a Turkish man sprinkling even more salt on it table-side before he reluctantly agrees to take a selfie with you … you get what I’m saying.

So maybe that’s why many fine-dining Thai restaurants (particularly those with an eye towards their own Michelin star) are ignoring the rules of the Thai “samrub” in favor of a Western-style procession of courses: some sort of amuse-bouche, the entrée (or even more ghastly) the “appetizer”, a salad, soup, fish, poultry, meat, pre-dessert, dessert, avant-dessert, petits fours and coffee and/or digestif. Don’t forget the wine pairing. Yes, Thai restaurants are doing this.

I probably don’t need to tell you how I feel about this, but I will, because it’s been a while (like three weeks? This year is already crazy) since my last food rant. This is colonization, the biggest expression of it since Thais were forced to use cutlery and sit on chairs (my mortal enemy!) in the face of threatening moves by both the British and French empires. Because of encroaching colonizers, we willingly colonized ourselves in a bid to look more “civilized” (the dreaded word sivilai is still used today!) Is this any different from what we see today, when the threat of encroaching bankruptcy spurs us to bow to our European ratings agency masters?

I had a meal at a promising restaurant helmed by a chef that I like, where the &*&%^$ing rice (from Surin, mind you, so it was very good rice) was cooked French pilaf-style and served with a $^&#@*ing fork and knife. Only a couple days later, I was at the new restaurant of another chef and can honestly swear I was served &*(#)@ing mixed salad from a bag as garnish for every dish that was served (“samrub”-style, admittedly). Needless to say, I did not enjoy these meals. I can’t believe that any people did. I mean (I’m not done yet), you can cut down on costs by serving Thai vegetables from a market. Thailand is known for growing a lot of them. But of course, you’d have to clean and prepare them yourself.

In case you think I am one of those Thai traditionalists who bemoan the fact that the food of their childhoods is slipping ever farther away, I did enjoy a recent fine dining meal at Coda. They, too, served Thai dishes Western-style, and they even did reinterpretations of Thai favorites like drunken noodles and (gasp) som tum. Here’s their take on gang som, with foam and everything, normally the nadir of all my food thoughts and prayers:

I can’t believe I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the dumb som tum Thai sorbet, the squid ink from the drunken noodles smudging my face, even the finishing flourish of surprise duck rice porridge after the dessert, mirroring Chef Tap Kokpol’s no doubt past experience of heading to a late-night khao thom restaurant after an unsatisfying fine dining meal. I liked it all. And what I liked best about it was that it proved to me that I’m not a traditional Thai food gremlin, not at all. I just like what I like.